Nova Scotia fills up on craft beer

Sam Fraser tends bar at Stillwell Beer Bar on Barrington Street in Halifax (top). Prof. Gordon McOuat holds a flask used for Pasteur's spontaneous generation experiment in his office at the University of King's College in Halifax (bottom left). He teaches a course about the history, culture and science of beer. Bartender Matt McIntyre pours some Big Spruce Cereal Killer at Stillwell Beer Bar. (Photos by ERIC WYNNE and RYAN TAPLIN / Staff)

Gordon McOuat has just come home from a sun-soaked afternoon at Nova Scotia’s newest brewery to chat about the world’s oldest beers.

The taste-testing at Tatamagouche Brewing Co. could be considered a business trip, though it was purely for pleasure; the professor at the University of King's College in Halifax teaches a class on the culture and history of brewing.

Craft brewing has exploded in the last 20 years, alongside the birth of a viable winemaking industry nurtured by the Annapolis Valley’s loamy soil. The Tatamagouche brewery puts the province’s list at 15.

While Nova Scotians have historically been a thirsty people, beer’s origin dates back to the Mesopotamian civilization, with the discovery of what appeared to be early recipes hewn into tablets.

“And the famous epic of Gilgamesh describes the discovery of beer as the invention of civilization,” McOuat said. “The inference is that almost every society makes beer because it’s pretty easy to make, and also that, in a lot of cases, it’s safer than water — because of the alcohol.”

The cloudy beverage made of fermented cereal pulp went to drinkers’ heads. And although they may not have realized that the alcohol killed bacteria, subsequent societies continued to quench their thirst with ale, albeit increasingly modern incarnations of the brew.

In the Middle Ages, the women of the household took on the task of brewmaster, something for both the family to drink and to sell to local inns or travellers.

But beer and societal progress go bottle in hand, McOuat argues, drawing connections between scientific and industrial advancements and lager, stouts and pilsners.

The Whitbread brewery in London, England, put the first modern steam engine to work mixing the mash and lifting casks of ale. As machines took over, breweries adopted the size and atmosphere of factories, churning out huge profits with barrels of beer “so big you could have dinner parties inside them,” McOuat said.

Those profits funded scientific studies — anything related to the brewing or its consumption.

“The most important laboratory in Europe in the late 19th century was the Carlsberg Laboratory,” McOuat said.

There, they studied mathematics, physics, health and agricultural science, the latter focusing especially on yeast. The brewery also sponsored research in Copenhagen that led to the discovery of quantum mechanics.

“So quantum mechanics actually came out of beer,” McOuat said.

The return to craft brewing actually marks the renaissance of the nanobreweries that came before the Industrial Revolution when widows and innkeepers’ wives made and traded in ale.

California leads the trend in the United States, pumping out 2.95 million barrels of craft beer in 2012, according to statistics from the Brewers Association.

In Nova Scotia, business is booming. According to numbers from the Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation, Nova Scotia craft beer accounted for $4.034 million in sales at NSLC outlets in the 2013/14 fiscal year, compared to $3.305 million the year before. Four new craft breweries have opened in Nova Scotia in the past year alone. And the industry estimates that the province's microbreweries employ more than 200 Nova Scotians.

It's more proof that the craft-brewing movement is travelling quickly eastward, Chris Reynolds said. The co-owner of Stillwell Beer Bar on Barrington Street in Halifax watched Toronto’s craft breweries compete for a market share in the trendy pubs popping up in the last five years.

And it made him and his partners realize that could happen in Halifax, too.

“The U.S. has really led the global craft beer resurgence,” Reynolds said.

While part of that may be connected to the buy-local movement, it is largely driven by the quality of the handcrafted beer, he said.

The future of Nova Scotia’s brewing industry may also be evolving from the province’s success with the grapevine. Reynolds points to the Jost family, Nova Scotia’s pioneering vintners, who have sold their interests in that to start the Tatamagouche brewery.

“People wanted a huge variety of wine, and now they want a huge variety of beer that they can be connoisseurs about rather than just drinkers.”

The Nova Scotia Liquor Corporation Regulations define a microbrewery as “a small free-standing brewery which produces less than 15,000 hectolitres (one hectolitre is 100 litres) of beer per year” and a brewpub as “a small-capacity brewery which, unless otherwise approved by the corporation, produces less than 2,000 hectolitres of beer per year”.

Microbreweries can sell their product in packaged form or in kegs, and can sell through the NSLC store network, through the private wine and specialty store network, or direct from the brewery to retail customers.

Microbrewery products sold through the NSLC network enjoy a reduced markup. Those same products also have no markup at New Brunswick and P.E.I. liquor stores through a reciprocal agreement with those provinces.

Microbreweries can sample and sell their products at Nova Scotia farmers markets.

Many microbreweries and licensed brewpubs in Nova Scotia sell their beers in bottles or in "growlers", 1.89 or 2-litre sealed jugs that are refillable at the brewery or brewpub.

A quick survey finds that there are more than 50 different beers produced by Nova Scotia's 15 microbreweries. And more are being brewed all the time.